Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

Why Retcons are bad writing

Zhugan·9/5/2014, 3:40:54 PM·2 votes·1,909 views

Lets say that I write a novel. It is good taken on its own and becomes far more successful than I imagined, so I turn that novel into a series. By the end of the series I have achieved several main things...

  1. It is WILDLY popular.
  2. I have used up all of the most convenient ways to continue expanding the world due to constraints I put in the first novel when I didn't even realize I was going to be making a longer series.
  3. Those constraints, while limiting, don't stop me from expanding the world. They just make it more difficult and lead to some elements being repetitive (could even be called trite) across my characters.

So, if I wanted to be taken seriously as an author and wanted to continue writing in that world, which would be the proper choice...

  1. Destroy the things that are creating confines by removing it from the world via retcons (which makes further writing easier), with the caveat that everything I wrote before is basically null.

OR

  1. Accept that I created constraints and the only valid way to remove them would be to remove them as a part of the world building process. (Example: I don't like having a pesky "Institute of War" so I have the combined might of "Demacia" and "Noxus" obliterate them so they can resume their conflict without the intervention of a disinterested third party.)

It seems to me that one of those decisions is more honest writing and one of them isn't. It seems to me that one of those is a good way of expanding a world and one of them is ultimately more destructive than it is creative. It seems that one of those is the right way to do things, and one of them simply isn't.

So, I have to ask, why would a book be held to one standard of world building, but the lore of a video game played by tens of millions of people isn't? Why is it okay for Riot to do this, but basically any author ever would lose their entire readership? I'm not saying that I won't play LoL anymore (it is free after all), but I sure as hell won't spend money on something that willfully takes the easy way out because they don't like constraints that they put on themselves. Riot should've owned up to its decisions and figured out a way of addressing those problems in a way that showed some literary integrity, and not just waved the world away as if we wouldn't even notice.

TL;DR: Just read it.

31 Comments

Dr Clueless PhD9/5/2014, 3:56:40 PM2 votes

I get what you're saying, but retcons are a common thing, and they're not some atrocity that everyone looks down on as shoddy writing. Comic books are the worst offenders of all, between straight-up retcons and new generations, but we're not lynching them. Also, even novelists have retconned. Yeah, it happens. Orson Scott Card retconned some stuff from Ender's Game in later books.

It happens. It's not shoddy writing. It's not dishonest. It's a brutal yet effective way of handling a situation where you wish you'd done something differently. You simply make it different. Plenty of us would certainly be happier with some contrived reason for the Institute to fall apart, but Riot wouldn't. They don't want that in their stories anymore. And we aren't the authors here, they are.

Edit: Also, you didn't actually address the point in your title. You haven't made any arguments for why retconning is bad writing. You said that you think it's dishonest, but you haven't defended that. You said it's more destructive than creative, but I think you're grasping at straws. If you want to argue about retconning being bad writing, I'm all for it, but you haven't actually done so.

Chilroy9/5/2014, 4:03:08 PM1 votes
  1. Destroy the things that are creating confines by removing it from the world via retcons (which makes further writing easier), with the caveat that everything I wrote before is basically null.
    OR
  2. Accept that I created constraints and the only valid way to remove them would be to remove them as a part of the world building process. (Example: I don't like having a pesky "Institute of War" so I have the combined might of "Demacia" and "Noxus" obliterate them so they can resume their conflict without the intervention of a disinterested third party.)

It seems to me that one of those decisions is more honest writing and one of them isn't. It seems to me that one of those is a good way of expanding a world and one of them is ultimately more destructive than it is creative.

Option 2 could never happen in the current lore, Demacia wouldn't dare destroy an institute containing the Noxian war machine, though by the end of the JoJ maybe they would try. Try being the key word, since all the Summoners are god-tier mages that could obliterate both Noxus and Demacia (Just read Lee-Sin's Lore). I like the Judgements, I love the old lore, but I realize Riot needs to reset this so the story isn't so convoluted with disconnected lores, unfinished story arcs, (Frejlord patch doesn't count as it's new lore) stagnant story of people in the league who will never get what they want.

I understand this is hard to accept everything changing, but until we've made to other side we can't judge appropriately, so yes I'm scared jumping into a dark hole because who knows where it goes? We just have to make the journey.